Hacker News: smat

New comment by smat in "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28"

smat — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 09:43:14 +0000

Check out Asahi Linux, they run on Apple Silicon and have translation for 32 and 64 bit x86, so they even go further than what Rosetta achieved. Open Source as well.

New comment by smat in "Formally verifying a floating-point division routine with Gappa – part 1"

smat — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 07:50:19 +0000

A very interesting read.

The article states that they added a computational correction step which is run whenever a result might be incorrect but skip it most of the time.

I am wondering whether this might cause problems for small real-time systems that do not have an FPU. If the runtime cost of an operation depends on the input, it is very hard to figure out whether deadlines can be met in all operation conditions.

New comment by smat in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

smat — Thu, 22 May 2025 06:28:23 +0000

Great post, the fusion of scale with unit is a mess.

When using it as a factor, for example when describing attenuation or amplification it is fine and can be used similar to percent. Though the author is right - it would be even more elegant to use scientific notation like 1e-4 in this case.

For using it as a unit it would really help to have a common notation for the reference quantity (e.g. 1mW).

But I guess there is no way to change it now that they are established since decades in the way the author describes.

New comment by smat in "Why fastDOOM is fast"

smat — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:01:20 +0000

While this gives an impressive boost in performance, it also means that frametimes are around 10% longer when the status bar has to be updated.

Overall this can mean that in some situations the game feels not as smooth as before due to these variations.

Essentially when considering real time rendering the slowest path is the most critical to optimize.

New comment by smat in "Liberating Wi-Fi on the ESP32 [video]"

smat — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:25:18 +0000

Nordic semiconductor also has microcontrollers with BT and Wifi. They are much less common than espressifs solution though.

New comment by smat in "Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – AI Twist on an Old Scam (2023)"

smat — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:08:05 +0000

Though this is an artificial constraint imposed by the platform holders (i.e. Apple and Google).

Once they figured out how their new AI assistant needs to look like their own rules for 3rd party apps won’t matter anymore.

New comment by smat in "Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice"

smat — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 07:06:25 +0000

I could see that in the coming years the value of Waymo for Google is not actually in collecting revenue from transportation fees but to collect multi modal data to feed into its models.

The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.

New comment by smat in "Stable Audio: Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion"

smat — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 11:43:28 +0000

You are right it feels off.

The position of the guitar in stereo is all over the place, higher frequency elements appear to come from the left while other parts are more centered.

New comment by smat in "Germany Achieves Record 57.7% Renewable Energy Share for First Half of 2023"

smat — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 12:44:17 +0000

At the same time France had to buy loads of electricity from Germany in the last year because several nuclear plants had to shut down due to a) maintenance problems and b) low rivers that could not provide sufficient cooling.

New comment by smat in "Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod"

smat — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 08:58:38 +0000

You also pay for quality control. Cheaper brands often have decent audio quality on average but high variation in between individual pairs of headphones. They also tend to fall apart after 1-2 years of use in my experience.

New comment by smat in "The last days of Berlin’s gas streetlamps"

smat — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 05:51:13 +0000

You can modulate the brightness without flicker, you can try it yourself with a lab power supply.

It is just that filtering the output of the regulator is “expensive” as you need a relatively large capacitor. If this is omitted in combination with a low frequency PWM, you will experience flicker.

New comment by smat in "A collection of lock-free data structures written in standard C++11"

smat — Wed, 10 May 2023 13:58:48 +0000

I assume the author of the library works under a hard real-time constraint. Under such circumstances (an example would be low latency audio) you can not tolerate the latency impact of a sporadic syscall.

New comment by smat in "Microsoft limits Bing chats to 5 questions per session, 50 questions per day"

smat — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 07:57:28 +0000

According to an article at Ars [0], longer sessions are more likely to output undesired responses from bing chat. So the limits might simply be a workaround to avoid articles about strange behaviour.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/micro...

New comment by smat in "MusicLM: Generating Music from Text"

smat — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:37:08 +0000

I would argue that the people who use AI generated assets and combine them for a bigger thing such as a video game are still artists. They are simply realizing their vision on a higher level.

New comment by smat in "Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robot Atlas can now grab and toss"

smat — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 07:20:51 +0000

Boston dynamics also published a making of video. There it is explained why the luggage scenario is still far away: The robot has perfect knowledge of the object it is transporting (size and weight distribution). In order to be able to transport any object, the control algorithms need to be able to estimate themselves where to grip an object and what the objects weight distribution is.

Still, the results are very impressive.

New comment by smat in "Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US"

smat — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 15:41:43 +0000

They are using a combination of lidar with HD maps, radar and cameras.

New comment by smat in "Picolibc: C library designed for embedded 32- and 64- bit systems"

smat — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 06:18:58 +0000

Is there a list of functions for newlib?

New comment by smat in "Zen4's AVX512 Teardown"

smat — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 17:33:49 +0000

Very interesting read. The author notes that double pumping the 512 bit instructions to 256 bit execution units appears to be a good trade-off.

As far as I understood ARMs new SIMD instruction set is able to map to execution units of arbitrary width. So it sounds to me like ARM is ahead of x86 in flexibility here and might be able to profit in the future.

Maybe somebody with more in-depth knowledge could respond whether my understanding is correct.

New comment by smat in "Hollywood’s visual effects crisis"

smat — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 08:09:25 +0000

I am also curious how this period in movies will hold over time. Older movies with more practical effects (such as Star Wars) still have a very crisp look to them while newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing.

New comment by smat in "Some Epson printers are programmed to stop working after a certain amount of use"

smat — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:14:07 +0000

Appears to be common industry practice at least for entry level devices. My old HP has the same behavior. Cannot scan with a defective print head.